Rex Smith: Ella’s lessons for adult Americans

If you want to renew your confidence in the future — if you desperately need, as many of us do these days, to rise above the despair wrought by bloodlust abroad and political treachery at home — you need to spend some time with a kid like Ella.

Ella is 10, and going on 17, judging by her reading list and style sense. She’s about to start fifth grade at a public school in a Boston suburb. She came by my office this week with her notebook in hand, ready to be a reporter, already displaying the attributes that make for both good journalism and good citizenship.

Namely: Curiosity about what we don’t know. Wisdom to recognize that one point of view rarely captures the whole truth. Energy to pursue an understanding of those varied perspectives.

Ella is my niece’s kid, and she has just finished a weeklong “junior journalists” course that’s part of a community education program in her town. She proudly showed off her bylines in the little newspaper her group had created, and explained to me that while she thinks she may want to be a teacher when she grows up, for now she likes asking people questions and writing about what they tell her.

“I do get shy, but once I get enough courage to actually ask a question, then I don’t really mind,” she said.

Ella explained to me that you can’t find out the whole story about something by asking just one person – that what somebody thinks is true may not be quite right, because we each see only through our own eyes, and “somebody else sees it through their eyes, which are different.”

And there you have it: a reporter needs multiple sources to begin to decipher the truth. It’s a basic lesson of journalism, but lay that aside. Kids like Ella need to learn it more because it applies to good citizenship.

Sure, I got a kick out of the fact that Ella liked her week of being a reporter. And she seems to be a good writer. But I’m not holding out hope that she’ll become a journalist. I’m just excited that the lessons she is learning go beyond writing, and into a category you might consider “social studies.”

It’s a subject that some research suggests fills less than 8 percent of the instructional time in our elementary schools. Judging by what kids know by the time they graduate from high school, that’s not enough.

In all the roiling conversation about what’s going on in our schools — the unhappiness about excessive testing, the back-and-forth over the Common Core standards and the political fights over how much taxpayers ought to be ready to pony up for quality education for our kids — you don’t hear much about teaching young people the values that define being a good citizen.

There’s plenty of hand-wringing about the fact that American students aren’t doing as well as children from other countries in basic subjects. A few months ago, for example, we were blasted by the terrible results of the so-called PISA tests, which compared American 15-year-olds with their cohort in 33 other developed countries. Our kids ranked 17th in reading, 21st in science and 26th in math.

That sort of statistic is what led almost all the states to join in creating and adopting the Common Core standards. It wasn’t a federal mandate, despite opportunistic politicians who are now trying to paint it as a plot to remove local control of schools; it was a push from a wide range of constituencies who shared the worry that our national security and economic stability will be at risk if our schools turn out graduates who can’t compete in the global marketplace.

But we should be equally concerned about whether young people are learning the fundamentals of citizenship. Fewer than a quarter of all 8th- and 12th-graders scored at or above proficiency in the most recent national civics test. Results were even worse on the U.S. history test: just 18 percent of 8th-graders and 13 percent of 12th-graders were at least proficient.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that a key role of education was to teach each student “his duties to his neighbors and country.” That’s no less true now. If kids don’t come out of school understanding how to interact as U.S. citizens or caring about civic life, they’ll be an ignorant population easily manipulated by politicians.

The solution lies beyond the classroom, though that’s where the basics of civics can be taught. A lifelong commitment to citizenship requires characteristics my grandniece has begun to display: curiosity, respect for diverse views, and a sense of how to separate truth from rumor (plus, of course, a desire to do so).

Mind you, Ella is only 10. We’re older. Surely we’re good role models of citizenship for her to emulate. Aren’t we?